Multi-level agent-based modeling - A literature survey

During last decade, multi-level agent-based modeling has received significant and dramatically increasing interest. In this article we present a comprehensive and structured review of literature on the subject. We present the main theoretical contributions and application domains of this concept, with an emphasis on social, flow, biological and biomedical models.Comment: v2. Ref 102 added. v3-4 Many refs and text added v5-6 bibliographic statistics updated. v7 Change of the name of the paper to reflect what it became, many refs and text added, bibliographic statistics update

A Review of Platforms for the Development of Agent Systems

Agent-based computing is an active field of research with the goal of building autonomous software of hardware entities. This task is often facilitated by the use of dedicated, specialized frameworks. For almost thirty years, many such agent platforms have been developed. Meanwhile, some of them have been abandoned, others continue their development and new platforms are released. This paper presents a up-to-date review of the existing agent platforms and also a historical perspective of this domain. It aims to serve as a reference point for people interested in developing agent systems. This work details the main characteristics of the included agent platforms, together with links to specific projects where they have been used. It distinguishes between the active platforms and those no longer under development or with unclear status. It also classifies the agent platforms as general purpose ones, free or commercial, and specialized ones, which can be used for particular types of applications.Comment: 40 pages, 2 figures, 9 tables, 83 reference

Efficient Communication and Coordination for Large-Scale Multi-Agent Systems

The growth of the computational power of computers and the speed of networks has made large-scale multi-agent systems a promising technology. As the number of agents in a single application approaches thousands or millions, distributed computing has become a general paradigm in large-scale multi-agent systems to take the benefits of parallel computing. However, since these numerous agents are located on distributed computers and interact intensively with each other to achieve common goals, the agent communication cost significantly affects the performance of applications. Therefore, optimizing the agent communication cost on distributed systems could considerably reduce the runtime of multi-agent applications. Furthermore, because static multi-agent frameworks may not be suitable for all kinds of applications, and the communication patterns of agents may change during execution, multi-agent frameworks should adapt their services to support applications differently according to their dynamic characteristics. This thesis proposes three adaptive services at the agent framework level to reduce the agent communication and coordination cost of large-scale multi-agent applications. First, communication locality-aware agent distribution aims at minimizing inter-node communication by collocating heavily communicating agents on the same platform and maintaining agent group-based load sharing. Second, application agent-oriented middle agent services attempt to optimize agent interaction through middle agents by executing application agent-supported search algorithms on the middle agent address space. Third, message passing for mobile agents aims at reducing the time of message delivery to mobile agents using location caches or by extending the agent address scheme with location information. With these services, we have achieved very impressive experimental results in large- scale UAV simulations including up to 10,000 agents. Also, we have provided a formal definition of our framework and services with operational semantics

09121 Abstracts Collection -- Normative Multi-Agent Systems

From 15.03. to 20.03.2009, the Dagstuhl Seminar 09121 ``Normative Multi-Agent Systems \u27\u27 was held in Schloss Dagstuhl~--~Leibniz Center for Informatics. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general

A Scalable Runtime Platform for Multiagent-Based Simulation

Abstract. Using purely agent-based platforms for any kind of simulation requires to address the following challenges: (1) scalability (efficient scheduling of agent cycles is difficult), (2) efficient memory management (when and which data should be fetched, cached, or written to/from disk), and (3) modelling (no generally accepted meta-models exist: what are essential concepts, what just implementation details?). While dedicated professional simulation tools usually provide rich domain libraries and advanced visualisation techniques, and support the simulation of large scenarios, they do not allow for "agentization" of single components. We are trying to bridge this gap by developing a distributed, scalable runtime platform for multiagent simulation, MASeRaTi, addressing the three problems mentioned above. It allows to plug-in both dedicated simulation tools (for the macro view ) as well as the agentization of certain components of the system (to allow a micro view ). If no agent-related features are used, its performance should be as close as possible to the legacy system used

Game Engines and MAS: BDI & Artifacts in Unity

In questa tesi vedremo un breve sunto riguardo lo stato dei Sistemi Multi-Agente e andremo ad analizzare le limitazioni che attualmente ne impediscono l'utilizzo ai programmatori di videogiochi. Dopodiché, andremo a proporre un nuovo linguaggio BDI, basato su Prolog e inspirato a Jason, che, grazie all'interprete Prolog sviluppato da I. Horswill, darà la possibilità al programmatore di videogiochi di esprimere comportamenti dichiarativi di alto livello per agenti autonomi all'interno del game engine Unity. Andremo anche a proporre una versione di Artefatto per la modellazione dell'ambiente in una scena Unity e un layer di comunicazione che agenti e artefatti possano utilizzare per interagire tra loro. Infine presenteremo un caso di studio per sottolineare i benefici che questo sistema fornisce

The 1990 progress report and future plans

This document describes the progress and plans of the Artificial Intelligence Research Branch (RIA) at ARC in 1990. Activities span a range from basic scientific research to engineering development and to fielded NASA applications, particularly those applications that are enabled by basic research carried out at RIA. Work is conducted in-house and through collaborative partners in academia and industry. Our major focus is on a limited number of research themes with a dual commitment to technical excellence and proven applicability to NASA short, medium, and long-term problems. RIA acts as the Agency's lead organization for research aspects of artificial intelligence, working closely with a second research laboratory at JPL and AI applications groups at all NASA centers